Thousands of people in northern Myanmar took to the streets on Monday to protest against the proposed reinstatement of a Chinese-backed mega-dam they say will cause huge environmental damage and bring little benefit to the country.The protest came just days ahead of a trip by civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi to Beijing for a summit on China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).Myanmar's former military junta signed a 2009 deal with Beijing to construct the Myitsone dam in Kachin state.B

At the Shu Le County Education Centre, a sprawling three-story complex in China’s far west region of Xinjiang, the dormitories feature bars on windows and doors that only lock from the outside.Inside are hundreds of minority Muslim Uighurs who have no way of leaving without an official escort, even though Chinese officials who took a group of foreign journalists around the “transformation through education” camp this week insisted they were there voluntarily.

Malaysia will revive a US$34 billion Chinese-backed transport and property development that was abandoned in 2017, the prime minister said Friday, adding the project would contribute to Beijing’s global infrastructure drive.The announcement came after the countries agreed this month to resume work on a previously suspended railway project in Malaysia, and is the latest sign of improving ties after a rocky period.The 140-billion-ringgit (US$34 billion) Bandar Malaysia development in Kuala Lump

After coming into power last year, the Alliance of Hope (Pakatan Harapan)-led government of Malaysia had decided to halt the progress of local projects that were run by China-based companies. Two of these were railway projects – the High-Speed Rail (HSR) and the East Coast Rail Link (ECRL).

The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) is set for a revamp, and it is squarely aimed at countering China’s growing geopolitical influence.

For more than two years, China has waged a campaign of unparalleled repression against its Islamic minorities, incarcerating an estimated one-sixth of the adult Muslim population of the Xinjiang region at one point or another.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has warned Beijing to back off from a disputed island in the South China Sea, warning of possible military action if China "touches" it amid rising tensions over the key waterway.Duterte, aiming to attract trade and investment from the Asian superpower, has mostly withheld his early criticism of Beijing's expansive claims to the sea – a point of regional contention because trillions of dollars of goods pass through it.But as the Philippine m

The Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) marked its third anniversary last week with the announcement that China’s trade with the five Mekong member countries – Cambodia, Lao, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam – has reached over US$260 billion for the period, highlighting the overarching role China plays in these five countries’ economies.A sub-regional cooperation mechanism connecting the six countries along the Mekong river, which is known as Lancang in China, the LMC was formed in March 2016 and h

For the West, the year 2008 marked the beginning of a difficult period of crisis, recession, and uneven recovery. For China, 2008 was also an important turning point, but one followed by a decade of rapid progress that few could have foreseen.Of course, when the United States (US) investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a global financial crisis, China’s leaders were deeply worried.

Between June 2017 and April 2018, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Humanitarian Health carried out a study on almost 400 migrant women from Myanmar between the ages of 15 and 55, who were married to Chinese men and experienced childbearing in the five years they were in China.The study, supported by the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand (KWAT), found that almost 40 percent of them were victims of forced marriages.